Ten Things You Don't Need for St Patrick's Day

No holiday is safe from the crap-makers: Christmas is an orgy of unneccessarity, Valentines is drowning in pink, and now they're going after the alcohol. Here are ten St Patrick's day gifts even the most inebriated leprechaun wouldn't touch with a pot of gold. Because even when you're two foot tall and clad entirely in cliche, you don't need this:

1. Need This? Drink Breasts

Hey there lady, do you wish you could simultaneously carry free beer and have bigger breasts? Then congratulations, you don't need to buy anything because you're a figment of a teenage boys imagination! Thrillist, however, are ready should you ever exist with the Winerack . They point out how smuggling bladders of booze on your chest makes your breasts look bigger. They don't say anything about dealing with mammaries that deflate and turn wrinkly over the course of the night - though you could view it as training for life.

2. Need This? 64 MB Beer MP3 Player

Many products, from late night hot dogs to streetcorner roses-for-a-dollar, hinge entirely on the fact that drunks routinely make very poor decisions. This electronic abortion , shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show last year, rests entirely on the fact that it looks like a beer. Because:

a) 64 MB is barely enough memory to record a sneeze.
b) I'm informed it sounds like putting your head in a bucket while your drunk friends karaoke the song in a different room. After a tracheotomy.

Needless to say, just looking like beer doesn't generate drunken mistakery in the viewer, and the product has not fared well.

3. Need This? Beer Belly

Truly, we have advanced as a culture. My father had to drink his way to an unsightly beer belly the old-fashioned way. Now you can buy your own, and apply liters of sloshing alcohol to your gut directly! Featuring everything that's wrong with the Beer Bra without even pretending there's an upside. Bonus points for the male model in the picture. "Yes, I'm an alcoholic just like you! I mean, whenever I'm not spending five hours a day in the gym, I'm definitely in - er, pubs, right?"You can get your own Beer Belly here.

4. Need This? Beer Shorts

Straight from a college movie, a sneaky way to smuggle beer into guarded or expensive areas. The reason it works in movies is because you don't see the awkwardness of wearing them, or feel the terrible sensations of walking with loose sacks of liquid strapped to your nether regions. To say nothing of the shame of being caught in what look like floppy cyber-diapers . And if you can't see the problem in wearing large sacks of booze around your crotch in public, then you're likely too drunk to even read this right now.You can get your beer shorts here.

5. Need This? Hangover Facebook Game

Facebook is no longer the belle of the social networking ball, with its useful features drowning in a sea of endless timewasters that reveal just how boring your friends are. The worst example is the "Hangover" online collectible card game . Combining Pokemon with facts about hangovers, so it's clearly an attempt by Satan to combine all the worst things in the world into one online nightmare (expect a Paris Hilton element to be added soon). Hangovers are not something to be celebrated. Focusing on simulating aspects of the morning after without even having a night before? Are people daring each other to be as worthless as possible?

6. Need This? Video-recording Karaoke Machine

This karaoke machine has "Bad idea" written all over, specifically where it says "This will record you drunkenly karaok-ing". The whole point of the drunken singalong is a sheer freedom from consequences or basic common sense, restraint or tone. In this modern world of YouTube travesties, the last thing you want is your own hardware to automatically record your inebriated screeching of "Take on MEEEEEEEEEEE!"

7. Need This? Party In Progress Set

Once you've set up your fake-crime scene party borders , all you need to add is a thousand applications of the word "Brah", some empty pizza boxes, and a couple of worryingly drunk freshmen cheerleaders to complete that "Asshole frat party" vibe. Besides, if you have to inform people in writing that they are entering a party zone, you're probably lying to them.

8. Need This? The Shot Caller

Perhaps realising that Bruce Willis will annihilate them if they attack directly, the machines are getting more cunning in their attempts to wipe us out. The "Century" is a drinking game where the victims must take a shot a minute, every minute, for over an hour and a half (I'm sure you can work out exactly how many minutes). The fact that college campuses aren't littered with corpses proves that this rarely happens, with all the players getting too drunk, distracted or diuretic to keep to the schedule. That's where the fun comes from - it's a tool to generate merriment and mayhem, not an actual nine-to-five job where you have to complete the task to get your paycheck.

9. Need This?Beer Can Containing Simpsons Playing Cards

Do you enjoy beating jokes into the ground ten years after they stopped being funny? Do you like things that look like beer, but aren't actually beer? Then congratulations, this is the product for you! Also, you are never invited to any party of mine, ever. In fact you're rarely invited to parties at all. These factors are not unrelated.

10. Ultimate Need This? Mark Your Wiz with Whizmark

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is: absolute proof that advertising executives are inhuman monsters out to insanify you. The Whizmark aka "Oh my god they've actually put video ads inside the urinals". This is nothing less than an attack on humanity itself. The few moments of porcelain peace gained by taking a slash are sometimes the only thinking time the poor drinking man gets, and they want to replace our ability to plan with ads for chewing gum? Marketing experts already use a number of frighteningly advanced techniques to make us buy their particular brand of near-identical products. Forcing a man to connect your sales pitch to when he's holding his pride and joy is literally below the belt.

Though when companies realise exactly what will happen to images of their product in this location, maybe they'll reconsider.

Republished from March 17, 2008

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